Climate change: solutions within our grasp

What’s up with climate change? Has it stopped yet, as some newspapers suggested?

Nope, sorry. It’s still galloping ahead. And next week we’ll hear exactly how fast, and what it will mean for our possible futures, as the world’s leading climate scientists issue their latest comprehensive assessment on what’s happening to our atmosphere, oceans, glaciers and so on, due to our continued fossil fuel addiction.

It’s been six years since the last assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). What can we expect this time?

It is no secret that despite previous stark warnings, the global emissions causing climate change continued to go up, not down. We’ve also learned that some parts of our climate system seem to be much more sensitive to warming than we thought, like the Arctic sea ice that has been disappearing before our eyes. So the new report is likely to make grim reading.

Will it be any different this time around then, in terms of action? Will Governments take notice?

The world is a very different place now. More and more people around the globe are experiencing climate-fuelled extreme weather events, such as deadly heat waves and devastating floods. As personal experience of the trauma of such events becomes more common, interest in understanding the effect of warming on extreme weather grows.

Last year over half of all new installed electric capacity worldwide was from renewable sources. Compared to conventional energy, the shares still remain modest, but the transition has truly started and some countries are already well on the way towards energy systems powered by solar, wind and other renewables. By 2050, renewable energy could meet almost all of the world’s energy needs, if the right policies are put in place, and if energy efficiency becomes a priority. Technology will no longer be a problem.

What of the fossil fuel industry, which has not only increased its activities and its emissions but has also funded disinformation campaigns about climate science in order to sow doubt and delay action?

The construction costs for conventional fossil fuel generation are increasing, whereas renewables are becoming more competitive in a growing number of markets, even without subsidies. Perhaps surprisingly, mighty coal has started to crumble due to air pollution regulations, lower demand projections, renewable energy uptake, worsening water constraints and growth of local anti-coal movements, among other things. These drivers are all reducing the attractiveness and competitiveness of coal. Among the most recent blows to coal’s future prospects were the decisions by the World Bank and the European Investment Bank to stop almost all lending to coal projects.

China’s recent decision to ban new coal power plants in three major industrial regions and to peak and decline their coal use by 2017 is especially promising: a major policy shift. Beijing’s “airpocalypse” – an exceptionally serious air pollution episode last January – created a tipping point for a political awakening that’s been building since 2011, with citizens demanding clean air.

Fossil fuels are yesterday’s energy. Of the 111 coal-plant proposals in Europe in 2008, only two materialised. Many more have closed or were shelved – and more will before 2015, as a new directive limiting air pollutants kicks in. Some market analysts suggest we are seeing the beginning of the end of coal.

And it’s not just coal. Analysts at investment bank Citi argue that oil demand could reach a tipping point much earlier than the market expects, and could peak by 2020. If demand falls, expensive carbon – like Canada’s tar sands and Arctic oil drilling – could become unprofitable. That’s an inconvenient projection for major oil companies.

So yes, it is different now. It is clearer than ever that we have some fundamental choices ahead of us about the kind of world we want to live in and the future we want to bequeath to our children. And while future prognoses look grim, there’s also new hope, in a way that didn’t exist in 2007.

Whilst they failed to deliver the global deal we were hoping for, world governments have agreed to keep global average temperature rise below 2 degrees C. To achieve this, emissions will need to stop growing well before 2020 and then rapidly decline towards zero in the coming decades.

It’s a tall order but the solution is within our grasp.

The right kind of future is absolutely possible. We must demand that our governments act now, and act swiftly, to speed up the clean energy transition and refuse to allow the fossil fuel industry to derail their efforts.

The IPCC will release the first chapter of its report: the Physical Scientific Basis, on 27 September in Stockholm. The next three chapters will be released next year. Greenpeace experts Stephanie Tunmore, Kaisa Kosonen and Martina Krüger are at the spot at the IPCC report approval meeting (23-26 September) in Stockholm. You can follow them on Twitter @kaisakosonen and @MartinaKrueger.

The AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population was founded in 2001. Since that moment I have seen it as a moral imperative to continue the work I’ve been doing for many years now: getting the message out and explaining to as many people as possible that human overpopulation of the Earth is occurring on our watch, that it poses profound existential risks for future human well being, life as we know it and environmental health, and that robust action is required starting here, starting now to honestly acknowledge, humanely address and eventually overcome.

There was ships worth about 2-3 Billion Dollars financed in the name of climate-protection. One of the bigger financial scandals in German history with courtcases about 2.2 Billion taking place right at the moment...frauds are funny persons - don't guess, climate was not protected at all!

Skysails has never been anything else than a PR-tool to finance cheap, chinese ships...try to imagine!!!

By the way, I have been warning about it since 2005...and fighting against it.

Sun Wu, godfather of the Rainbow Warrior III

PS: my ROADMAP for a reanimation of Greenpeace, the voice of our fragile earth

2.) attack BP (for being second biggest shareholder of Rosneft and providing the know how for Rosneft's Arctic-plans - and for the massive use of corexit 9527 in the gulf of mexico.

BP can be attacked in democratic surrounding, other than Gazprom...(but noone was listening to me - lets see what happens :)

3.) ARTIVISM - an alliance of the warriors of the rainbow and music (anonimously!)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pH3rhCT03I

...and light

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/21/the-boat-that-raved

4.)it is time to announce the second ER - after Greenpeace has announce the Energy Revolution as one of the first parties around (although Greenpeace never really seem to have understood the role Big Energy is playing up till today)...

...I do believe it would be time to announce the ECONOMIC REVOLUTION!

Therefor I would like Greenpeace to offer a home to the best economic brains of alternative nature.